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THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Shaking the Schools; When Perot Took On Texas -- A Special Report.; Education Initiative Revealed A Savvy and Abrasive Perot
By Susan Chira
June 29, 1992
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It was a tale of Texan proportions, complete with epic name-calling, massive lobbying and political skulduggery. It was Ross Perot's foray into the turbulent world of education reform -- and it offers a rare chance to examine how he operates in a political arena.
Mr. Perot proved he could learn quickly, sell bold policies to the public and ram them through a reluctant Legislature. But he also showed a taste for attention-grabbing invective that alienated some of the very people whose help he needed to change the state's education system.
In 1984, Texas adopted one of the most sweeping education laws in its history, paid for by its first state tax increase in 13 years. Although he must share credit with top state officials, it was Mr. Perot who led the charge. It was he who barnstormed the state in his own jet convening public hearings on Texas's schools. It was his biting one-liners that sold many Texans on the changes. It was his money that paid for one of the biggest lobbying efforts this state capital had ever witnessed. Measure of Leadership
Mr. Perot touts the $2.8 billion education package as proof that business methods, plain speaking and listening to people are indeed what it takes to forge policies, make changes and lead a nation. The law established a state preschool program for children with disadvantages, shifted school aid from rich to poor districts, reduced class sizes in early grades, toughened academic standards, mandated testing for teachers and raised teachers' salaries but linked raises to performance. And in a state where football reigned supreme, the law required students to pass all their courses or give up extracurricular activities like team sports.
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To shake up education in Texas, Mr. Perot used the very methods he says he would apply as President to all national policies: Convene experts; hold extensive public meetings; decide on a policy; and beat back every attempt to compromise it.
Mr. Perot did not answer messages left at his headquarters requesting comment on his role in the education law.
It is clear that for all Mr. Perot's protestations about the evils of political action committees and political insiders, he knew how to leverage his considerable influence and money to railroad opponents.
"It was like being in a sword fight with a pocket knife," said Eddie Joseph, executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association. The coaches fought Mr. Perot bitterly on the law, along with most Texas teachers unions, the state board of education and several powerful legislators.
It is less certain whether Mr. Perot could have succeeded had he actually been in government. He did not have to worry about angering those whose support might be crucial for re-election. Some of his opponents say his acid tongue and occasional strong-arm tactics alienated many school insiders.
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Ridiculing the widespread practice of making coaches principals, for example, Mr. Perot would ask all administrators to stand up during the public hearings he held across the state, recalled Becky Brooks, a teachers union lobbyist. Then he would ask those who were coaches to sit down. Nearly everybody sat, proving Mr. Perot's point, but humiliating coaches and many administrators.
Nor do observers agree on the lasting impact of the education law, although most believe it marked a dramatic step forward for Texas schools. Texas Whirlwind More Than State Had Bargained For
The education law that Mr. Perot helped shape and pass sought far-reaching changes. It gave Texas a preschool program for poor and non-English-speaking children. It transformed school finances, the state's first step toward redressing huge gaps in spending between rich and poor school districts.
Teachers received raises, but had to pass a competency test to keep their jobs. The law set maximum class sizes of 22 in early grades and required high-school students to pass a proficiency test to graduate. The infamous "no pass, no play" rule took on some of Texas's most sacred institutions, including football and county fairs, by forbidding students who failed a course to participate in extracurricular activities.
Texas officials had not planned on legislation so sweeping. But Gov. Mark White had promised teachers raises, and he decided he needed an influential businessman to help persuade the Legislature to raise the taxes to pay for them. In June 1983 he asked Mr. Perot to head a Select Committee on Public Education. 9-Month Investigation
Governor White got more than he had bargained for. Mr. Perot set the committee's agenda from the start, plunging it into a nine-month investigation of Texas schools. He paid education experts to testify before his committee, commissioned surveys of Texas teachers, held committee meetings in plush Dallas hotels with catered meals, flew an entourage of about 50 people around the state for public hearings and paid Thomas W. Luce, a prominent attorney and now head of his petition drive, to manage the effort.
Mr. Perot did not like what he found, and he told Texans so in blunt, uncompromising terms. Texas had world-class education in only a few areas, he said: "drill team, band and football." The state would no longer be able to count on oil to stay prosperous; it's children would need solid educations to compete in a high-technology world.
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Texans did not care enough about education, he said. Schools spent money on towel warmers and multimillion-dollar stadiums. "Kids who can barely read and write are leaving school at noon to cook hamburgers so they can make payments on their cars," he told audiences. His signature anecdote was a story about the boy who had been absent from school 35 days so that he could exhibit his pet chicken at livestock shows.
But what got people talking was one state icon, Mr. Perot, taking on another: football, a game that defines Friday nights in Texas.
"It was very difficult to tell during the heat of that battle whether he was a hero or Public Enemy No. 1," said George Christian, a lobbyist who later worked for Mr. Perot.
Texans are still divided. Many who worked with him, and even some who fought him on the education bill, said he was a sympathetic listener, an engaging and convincing talker. Visionary or Demagogue?
Some people complain that he didn't budge in the end. "When he talks about his town meetings, maybe Ross Perot has a vision of how things ought to be settled pre-town meeting, and maybe he uses the town meeting to solidify that," suggested Ms. Brooks, then president-elect of the Texas State Teachers Association, which fought the bill.
Sonia Hernandez, then a high-school principal and president of a grass-roots group working on school-finance issues, remembers a different Perot. After he had angered Hispanic parents by criticizing bilingual education, she asked him to reconsider and visit her school. "A couple of weeks later, I got this phone call out of the blue: Mr. Perot's in his plane, and he's going to land shortly, and he'd like to see what you're talking about." He came, listened and modified his position.
Others, however, saw him as dictatorial, simplistic and inflammatory. His cutting remarks made implacable enemies, like the longtime chairman of the State Board of Education, whose portrait, Mr. Perot once suggested, "may glow in the dark."
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He attacked courses such as drivers' education: "That's where they house the assistant coaches who are too dumb to teach regular classes."
Mr. Joseph of the coaches association said, "A lot of it was demagoguery."
Demagoguery or no, Mr. Perot's sound bite transfixed Texans, convincing many that their schools had to change. "That's where he came through, drawing up the final recommendations and selling them," said Camilla Bordie, who worked on the committee. "What was sold was the four or five main thrusts. You can kill the public with details, and he knows better than to do that." Lobbying Tactics Suffer No Fools, Take No Prisoners
At the opening of the June 1984 special legislative session convened to consider education reform, it appeared that Mr. Perot's bill was in serious trouble. He had angered many of the state's most powerful political groups: teachers unions, vocational educators, coaches, the State Board of Education and wealthy school districts that feared a drop in state aid.
A member of the State Board of Education hosted a lavish barbecue for legislators at a lakeside retreat, with swimming, water skiing and volleyball. The message got through; a survey of legislators by a Texas newspaper when the session began showed only a few willing to vote for the bill.
In response, Mr. Perot unleashed a massive lobbying effort and drew on his influence in his home state. Mr. Perot loaned five of his own lobbyists and lawyers from Electronic Data Systems, his computer services company, to the effort, sent Mr. Luce to Austin to lead the charge, and hired three of the state's most influential lobbyists. He "hired anybody who was warm," recalled Bill Hobby, then Lieutenant Governor. Inspired a Verse
Mr. Perot even sent female employees from Electronic Data Systems to talk to legislators and help host parties -- a common practice and master stroke, Ms. Brooks of the teachers association says.
Mr. Hobby commemorated the E.D.S. women in a poem he wrote about the battle: What with taxes and all, Lobbyists were thick as roaches. So it took all the Luce women To win the war against coaches.
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Mr. Perot helped forge a new alliance between traditional business groups and the state's growing high-technology industries, which were already demanding an improved education system. In the months before the session, he crisscrossed Texas addressing influential business groups: chambers of commerce, the Houston Board of Realtors, the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers Association. He videotaped his speech and sent it to places he did not visit personally.
"Mr. Perot did essentially what Reagan did; he went beyond the system and appealed to the people and sold them on the need for reform," said Jack Vowell, a Republican state legislator from El Paso who opposed the bill. "If pressure came to me to support the movement, it did not come from Mr. Perot; it came from my constituents, who felt like this was a good idea."
In the fight to move the bill through the Legislature, Mr. Perot, or at least the lobbyists he hired, proved to be masterful coalition builders. To pay for the expensive education wish-list, lawmakers would have to raise taxes for the first time in 13 years. Mr. Perot's allies chose to increase gasoline taxes, assuring the help of the powerful highway lobby because most of the tax revenues would be used for roads. All or Nothing
The same stubborn refusal to compromise that makes some people wary of Mr. Perot proved invaluable in forcing fundamental educational changes after years of failed efforts, veterans of Texas political battles say. He insisted that lawmakers pass all his recommendations or none of them.
"He did not permit the Legislature to cut it up in little pieces," said Craig Foster, executive director of the Equity Center, an association of poor school districts. "It shortcut all the usual nonsense. Leadership is bringing things to closure and getting on with it. That's what Ross Perot does better than anyone I've ever seen."
As influential as Mr. Perot was, he did not single-handedly turn around Texas education. Some of the most important political support and maneuvering came from Governor White, Lieutenant Governor Hobby and Gib Lewis, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. When the House Education Committee gutted the school bill in a daylong session, Mr. Lewis reportedly threatened to strip the chairman of his post unless he introduced a bill that incorporated Mr. Perot's recommendations.
Mr. Perot got much of the credit for the new law, but it was Governor White who paid a political price. He lost his re-election bid in 1986 -- a defeat he and others attributed to the anger of the powerful teacher unions and the coaches association. A Mixed Legacy Time Has Dimmed Legislation's Glory
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At the time, the legislation was hailed by education experts as a quantum leap forward for Texas schools. The mid-1980's were a time when sweeping education acts were being enacted by several states, including Arkansas under Gov. Bill Clinton and Tennessee under Gov. Lamar Alexander, now Secretary of Education. Frank Newman, president of the Education Commission of the States, which monitors school reform around the country, called Texas's law a "reasonably good example," although he believes that South Carolina's changes were probably the best in the nation.
Yet even eight years later, some of the changes enacted in Texas's schools seem visionary -- particularly in early childhood education, school finance and public attitudes about education.
Texas was ahead of its time in creating a state version of the Federal Head Start program for preschoolers. Educators continue to call for more emphasis on early childhood education, and Ms. Hernandez, now director of education for Gov. Ann W. Richards, says the impact of these programs in Texas has been enormous.
The law overhauled school financing, marking Texas's first real effort to address huge gaps in spending between rich and poor school districts.
Mr. Perot's support for the last two provisions -- whose proponents at the time were generally liberals -- shows his political eclecticism.
And his fighting words forever changed the political landscape in education. "A lot of people in their very own school districts started asking a lot of questions," said Ms. Bordie, who was on the committee staff. "A lot of the reforms that occurred were not the result of the Legislature so much as Perot highlighting the issue and making people pay more attention to what was going on in their own school."
The "no pass, no play" law infuriated many parents who felt that their children were being unfairly penalized, and it spawned a rush of lawsuits. But it also drove coaches to insure that their students got tutoring help, Ms. Hernandez said.
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Mr. Perot lost one major battle. He wanted a permanently appointed State Board of Education, reasoning that an elected group would not take on powerful vested interests. The law did establish an appointed board for four years, but voters turned down a referendum that would have made it permanent. Mr. Cole says that defeat allowed many who opposed further changes to sabotage the law effectively. Mixed Record of Success
And the 1984 law led to only modest improvements in student achievement. "We've had some changes in attitude, but, regrettably, many of the schools look the same as in 1983," said John Cole, president of the Texas Federation of Teachers, the only union that supported the bill.
Scores did climb steadily on the tests the law required, and the dropout rate fell from 34 percent to 21 percent. But that is still relatively high, and in the 1989-90 school year 23 percent of high-school seniors could not pass an English and math test required for graduation.
Some of the legislated changes brought unforeseen problems, particularly in light of the deep recession that hit Texas after the law was passed. Limiting class sizes to 22 in the lower grades is still widely praised, but it forced school districts to hire more teachers, and it strained budgets. The school-finance system has been ruled unconstitutional three times in the last four years, twice because, despite the 1984 law, huge inequities remained between rich and poor school districts, and once because the remedy was financed with an illegal tax. It is still being challenged in the courts.
Senator Parker, Governor White and nearly every teacher in Texas say that the teacher competency test, administered once in 1986, was a big mistake. Fewer than 1 percent of teachers failed, but the experience insulted and angered them.
"He got crossways with teachers, and that could have been avoided," Senator Parker said.
Education experts now say that the Texas law, like others of those years, focused too much on rule-making and too little on setting goals for students and letting teachers help them achieve those goals any way that works.
"In hindsight, they look very outmoded," Mr. Newman said. "But they said: 'Attention! The old world of half-baked schools isn't good enough.' "
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 1992, Section A, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Shaking the Schools; When Perot Took On Texas -- A Special Report.; Education Initiative Revealed A Savvy and Abrasive Perot. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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